Middle Ground

Middle Ground
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday February 28, 2015

A hair salon is a dangerous place for an existential crisis. Propped in a padded chair, I wear a black plastic cape like a shroud. A black hand-towel encircles my neck, fastened tightly at my throat with a press-stud. The young hairstylist stands behind me and slops her brush into a puddle of hair dye on her trolley. She carves a centre parting along my scalp then slaps her loaded brush back and forth across my greying head as if she’s painting a picket fence.

At some point, every client at the hairdressers must confront their reflection. And so, reluctantly, I drop my Woman’s Day and examine my mirror image. I’m pinned under a beam of white light from a ceiling as black as my middle-aged despair. (Salon lighting is designed to show off your hair at the expense of your face).

I inspect left and right, but no matter where I look, the maze of mirrors reflects bits of me I don’t want to see. I stare at my profile, wondering why my nose looks bigger than it used to. The back of my head is flatter than I remember. (Note to self: no more ponytails.) I see half-moons of blue shadow under my eyes. I’ve never noticed them before. When did my frown deepen from a crease to a furrow? My neck! Is that my neck? Why is there a pouch under my chin? I lift my chin, clench my jaw and the pouch tightens, then disappears, replaced by a collection of stringy tendons that stretch from jaw to collar bone. I pray to Hebe, Goddess of Youth, to spare me the arrival of those fleshy, drooping jowls.

I have been young all my life until now. Overnight, spots are appearing on the backs of my hands in pretty shades of fawn. My shape is shifting. A belt once emphasised my waist. Now it advertises tummy spillage. I have acquired what my nan used to call an ‘ample bosom.’ I no longer flaunt my knees in short skirts.

If I cover my left eye, the razor-edged fronds on the palm outside the window become a blur. If I cover my left, they turn to green fuzz. But with my glasses on, I can discern a lone ant marching down the spine. I spend more time thinking about the whereabouts of my specs than my children.

Middle age has reminded me I’ve run out of time to become a ballerina or capture a Higgs boson. Those dreams are dead. I failed to tap my potential. Squandering time was my teenaged occupation. In my twenties, life stretched boundlessly before me – there would be time for everything. How is it I have been to the funerals of three close friends my age?

At the Royal Show, I discovered fear has replaced recklessness. With seven-year-old son tugging me towards the rollercoaster, I passed off the knot in my stomach as excitement. I bought two tickets to the Wild Mouse, which seemed far scarier re-named the Python Loop. As the wheels began to rumble, I gave my son a fake grin and for the next two minutes, rode that rollercoaster with my eyes clamped shut in terror. Vertigo suffocated any euphoria. Middle age has taught me my limits.

Over 40s should not heap scorn on the young. It brands us as obsolete. Last week at a dinner, we mums lampooned our offspring’s bad taste in music.

“Have you actually listened to Limp Bizkit?” asked one. “The language is foul!”

We chimed in with our own examples until someone piped up: “Listen to us! We sound like our mothers!”

For a moment, we were dumbstruck.

I thought back to the day my own Mum announced she wouldn’t pay for ballroom dancing lessons just so I could obsess about the boys from the school next door. “You’re too old to understand!” I shouted, and flounced off to my room, satisfied I’d inflicted a punishing blow. She yelled back: “You’re too young to know anything!” Beneath my outrage, I suspected she was right.

Already, I feel my life narrowing. Ten years ago, a Saturday night at home was unthinkable. Now two nights out in a row is the result of poor planning.

No-one in the family wants to see me dance anymore. With Footloose on the telly, I spring out of the sofa. Teenage son mimes a cry for help.

“C’mon honey!” I yell. “I used to be a great dancer!”

“No, you didn’t. I can tell,” comes his withering reply. My hip wiggle peters out. I fear I’m the equivalent of a 50-year-old man growing a ponytail.

Perhaps middle age is the time to reflect – not on the aspirations we failed to realise – but on the bad things that never happened. In the meantime, I won’t be quitting dancing until the music stops.

In Another Life

In Another Life
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 11, 2014

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to be anymore,” said a woman’s voice. I swivelled to take in the two 50-something suburbanites at the next table. A busty redhead was resplendent in purple. Her friend, a diminutive blonde, was listening attentively. The cafe buzzed with the mid-morning coffee crowd.

“I don’t know whether to be a walk-over or a ball-breaker,” I heard the redhead say. And then she caught my eye and harrumphed: “Now there’s a topic for your article!”

I was startled to be recognised, preferring to be an incognito columnist. But the redhead smiled and shuffled her chair towards me. “You know what?” she said. “I’m 51. Divorced. Worked all my life, own my own place. And the single men I meet? They want a maid. A hooker. Or their mothers!”

Her blonde friend trumped her: “My husband moved in with his mother when we split up. Then he took up with a much younger woman and is bringing up step-children. I just don’t get it. He wasn’t that interested in his family the first time round.”

I nodded. “The divorces are just starting in our crowd,” I replied. “Some of them come out the blue. And then you find out they’ve been miserable for years.”

The redhead snorted. “I never thought I’d say it, but I’m happier alone.”

It was an odd conversation to have with strangers. But I admired this pair of straight-shooters for sharing their marriage autopsies. The fairytales were over. Divorce was finally losing it sting. Warily, these two friends were improvising new lifestyles.

I too, thought I could choreograph my life. I’d skip easily into marriage and motherhood. If I worked hard, my career would go exactly to plan. I’d engineer good luck, circumvent bad.

In my twenties, I mapped out my television ambitions with the same precision that I applied mascara and blow-dried my 80s bouffant. As a current affairs reporter working in Sydney, I fantasised about Kerry Packer pegging me to succeed Jana Wendt.

The one time I saw him in the Channel Nine corridors, he was barrelling towards me with an entourage of suits in tow. I flattened myself against the wall and squeaked ‘Morning Mr Packer!’ as he passed. For a second, I saw his slitted eyes flick in my direction. (Later, I decided he must’ve been eyeballing the poster of Ray Martin behind me).

Aged 25, I made prophecies about Mr Right and how I’d have two kids, two years apart. I’d take motherhood in my stride, keep a nice house, win the Pulitzer prize.

I remember a girls’ lunch on the back veranda of our rented cottage in Shenton Park. I was married, aged 30. The first of our babies had arrived but I was still staring at blank windows on pregnancy sticks. I gazed longingly at a friend’s newborn. Then someone piped up: “So, if one in three marriages ends in divorce, one of us will be separated before we’re 40. Who’s it going to be?”

We cast sideways glances at each other, mentally calculating whose union we envied most, whose marriage would sag under strain. I thought: “Well, it ain’t gonna be me.”

Five years later my marriage was over. People gossiped. I’d become a conspicuous failure.

Working full-time and with a 3-year-old, I learnt resilience. I signed the divorce papers, hung onto the house. I scrimped to pay the mortgage, worked punishing hours. Only once did I miss a kindy concert.

But on those nights my little boy stayed with his dad, I lay in bed – bereft – and re-imagined where I went wrong. Guilt would tunnel through sleep, and I’d wake feeling queasy and drained.

Somehow, I’d followed the path of the one man I’d vowed never to emulate. My father was a serial groom: five children by three marriages. The fallout from his two divorces littered three states. His own nervous breakdown was amongst the wreckage. No-one plans such heartache.

In the cafe, my new acquaintances had waved their goodbyes. I surveyed the customers queueing at the coffee machine. Who was contentedly partnered? Who was lonely? Who thought they’d found ‘the one’ and now lived with disappointment.

My first marriage feels like a pale version of a previous life. Our treasured small boy is suddenly a gangly teenager. He has a kid brother and sister. A step-father who adores him. Will I tell my lad I planned it that way? Or that everything happens by chance. Or, if you’re lucky, with perseverance.

Last night, I took a moment to admire the pragmatist I met by happenstance at the pub ten years ago. Sprawled on the sofa, he was absorbed in the Grand Prix, but I interrupted him anyway. “Has your life turned out the way you planned it?”

“Too early to tell,” he said. “You’re blocking the telly.”

The Naked Truth

The Naked Truth
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday May 25, 2013

My days as a nudist are numbered. Last week, in the mad rush to get my brood to school on time, I streaked past my husband on the way to the laundry to collect some knickers from the drier. Normally I’d have covered up with a towel, but I was feeling frisky, so I thought I’d give him an eyeful and set him up for his day at the office.

He was sitting on a kitchen stool eating Weetbix, absorbed in the newspaper. He glanced up as I sashayed past. I remembered the deportment coach from school telling us that a woman’s derriere is mesmerising to a man. I now get what she was on about – all that roundness and pertness, the curve of the waist giving way to the swell of the hips. So I floated by the kitchen bench on tiptoes knowing this would make my width taller and my cheeks cheekier. With a toss of my head, I shot him a wink over my shoulder.

He frowned at me and grunted: “Charming!” (This from a man with a milk moustache on his top lip.)

Deflated, I dressed as a hessian sack and slouched with the kids to school. Pushing my pram-borne 3-year-old home through the park, I deliberated: Is 45 too old to be getting around in the nick? Surely a naked wife at breakfast is more titillating than the finance pages? And if I’m now too dilapidated for household displays of nakedness, then maybe I’m too old for public displays of leopard print? Or leather? Was it time for my mid-life crisis?

In pursuit of enlightenment, I detoured to the shops. While small daughter dived into an icecream, I propped on a bench and sat back to appreciate middle-aged women dressing their age.

Women land in frock shops like homing pigeons. They coo to each other over the new season’s black and white, strutting with happiness to be in familiar territory. But the first squall of winter had willowy shop girls dressing their windows with Native American flavours – Cherokee-print cardigans, woolly and oversized and flattering only to long-legged teenagers called Pocahontas. If chunky cable knits are “in” (borrowed by the fashionable set from their boyfriends’ wardrobes), how will I look like in husband’s stick-brown number with elbow patches and a shawl collar? Five kilos heavier is my guess.

But there they were queuing up for the change-rooms, champion birds in their late 40’s, flushed from the gym and trying on those dangly cardigans with  jeans so tight I winced.  

Then gliding towards me came a 60-something fashionista. She was vacuum-packed into black leather skirt with studs down the seams and a plunging silk blouse that exposed a valley of leathery cleavage. Two teenagers did a double take and smirked. As she passed by, I noticed that she had the golden tan of the well-rested and gnarled toes from several decades of pointy shoes.

It takes supreme confidence to pull off a look that has other women mouthing “Mutton!” behind your back. But she walked with the aristocratic air of a dame who has (married) money. I admired her for the audacity of her fashion hope.

I’ve no such daring. I won’t risk short skirts for fear of drawing attention to my callused knees. That also rules out hot-pants and dresses slit to the thigh like Sonia McMahon’s. But skinny trousers make my legs look like strangled sausages, so they’re out too. What’s left? Aprons, overalls and peasant skirts. “Peasant” is one thing, but I don’t want to be mistaken for some wench harvesting a field of potatoes.

Up top, I have more problems. Middle-age spread is migrating from my dinner plate to my upper arms. My chest requires a pair of hammocks rigged with hawsers and struts, and the remains of my washboard stomach need to be disciplined with industrial underwear.

Then there’s middle-aged cleavage: too much is cheap, but I’m not ready for a wardrobe full of turtle necks. And don’t get me started on my neck, I’m praying middle-age doesn’t adorn me with a pouch like a pelican.

I no longer understand the fashion pages in Vogue, but the Women’s Weekly insists on dividing women into fruit shapes –  we’re either top-heavy apples  or bottom-heavy pears. I am an apple, but I’m only one Devonshire tea away from a pear.

Why aren’t men subjected to this fashion drivel? Men are either short, or tall. Fit, fat or thin. Or average. Average is a compliment. An average woman isn’t trying hard enough.

So we left the mall, my oval-shaped daughter and I, and mooched home. And that evening, I looked up the latest winter trends and discovered I should be wearing a metallic bomber jacket, a snakeskin print scarf and Frankie pants, which look like the world’s tightest tracky-daks . On a 45-year-old mother-of-three, that’s the kind of ensemble that gets muffled snorts at Coles. Until I find out who Frankie is, and whether she’s an apple or a pear, I’m sticking with my peasant skirt.

Mutton dressed as man

Mutton dressed as man
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday January 5, 2013
Section: Opinion

My husband is so fashion forward he thinks he’s the new black. Apparently, the new black is a portly but cute middle-aged father of three with Henry Kissinger glasses decked out in an electric yellow Polo shirt and cargo shorts with a hammer holder.

He’s not alone – I know other charismatic men of a certain age who dress smartly at the office, but who throw caution to the wind at weekends and go out in public looking like a one man sailing regatta – all stripes and baggywrinkled Bermudas –  convinced they’re the ship’s biscuit.

Or there’s the dad I know who favours an oversized mustard-coloured Rugby shirt he calls ‘Golden Boy’ because it protects against every combination of chocolate, coffee and clumsiness. If you’re a stylish woman blessed with a fashion plate husband of your own, you’ll understand where I’m coming from. Mine is more a fashion platter, an XL hunk of man who only sets foot in a clothing shop twice a year during the David Jones sales. It must have been there last summer, in the men’s department, that some pretty shop assistant managed to offload some unsaleable stock by telling him: “No, no sir, you’re one of the lucky ones – your ginger hair goes with everything .” (And canary yellow was everywhere in Kazakhstan this season.)

At weekends my Beau Brummel gets around in a kaleidoscope of loud boardies and even louder shirts. The new ones are so bright they hurt my eyes. The hot pink Polo is his pet right now, closely followed by the purple one with the chlorine stains down the front. His favourite shorts are printed with a rainbow of small elephants. Friends and family never tire of taking the mick: “Hey mate, when does the circus leave town?” but he refuses to take the bait. I fear he has become what the rag trade calls ‘the technicolor middle-aged.’

Don’t get me wrong, there’s not an ounce of vanity living in this man. He is no ageing peacock, he couldn’t care less what he looks like (obviously) nor does he give a hoot what people think. Clothes do not maketh my man, they are simply for hiding his nakedness.

I have given up trying to change him, or his clothes. I’ve got enough to worry about keeping my own fashion sense in check. But I bet on Saturday nights as babysitters arrive at their destinations all over town, there are wives saying to husbands: “You’re not wearing that are you?” All those tiffs that start with: “I’m not going out with you dressed like that!” Exasperated men trying to defend why they’re wearing their own ‘Golden Boy’ as the perfect camouflage for beer drips and gravy spills: “Hey, I chose this to save you some washing – I’ll get three wears out of this before anyone notices it’s dirty.” Uncle Tony says he’s learnt to save time (and marital grief) by saying: “Okay Marg – you choose what I should wear.”

I pity all those blokes being asked: “Does this dress make me look thinner or fatter?” Every woman knows this is a minefield across which no man has traversed successfully. I can see the look on my husband’s face as his brain registers a no-win situation. He’s only been waiting for me for twenty minutes while I agonise over what to wear. And yet my last act of wardrobe desperation is to ask a man who’s wearing a shirt with umbrellas all over it whether my outfit is flattering?

Those of you who think I’m being cruel should remember that I met this man when he was sporting a pair of Dunlop Volleys. I fell in love with him anyway. Since then I have had to attend all manner of social occasions on the arm of a man who thinks dressing up is wearing a cardigan.

Last Father’s Day I spotted an old man’s cardie in a shop selling Fair Isle jumpers  and other grandfatherly  attire and knew right away he would be beside himself: shawl collar, cable knit, covered buttons, deep pockets, I can’t remember if it had elbow pads but I bought it anyway. As a joke. I’ve had to put up with him going out in it every chance he gets with all the buttons done up. When the weather’s changeable he teams it with the elephant shorts.

On occasion, my fashion smorgasbord has been clairvoyant. He came home from a business trip to Spain some years ago sporting a pair of vibrant orange sneakers: “Mark my words, I’m way ahead of my time.” He wore them until they were in tatters, and basked in the smirks from strangers. Now neon runners are everywhere, and he likes to remind me:  “Orange is the new Matt.”

Having just moved house, I valiantly tried to cull his wardrobe. I had hopes of ushering some of the faded, torn or hopelessly stained specimens towards the Good Samaritan bin, but was intercepted with a furious: “Move away from the cupboard.” I made a futile attempt to argue the merits of spring cleaning but then gave up, defeated. In the end, it would be less trouble if the offending articles came with us. (Even the homeless have fashion standards.)

I have come to the conclusion that men, as they get older, realise that how they look has less and less to do with the quality of woman they attract. Partnered and 40, they stop trying to impress women by looking slick and cool because they’ve landed the one they want. So Monsieur begins dressing for comfort, sometimes in ways other blokes find amusing. He knows it isn’t pretty but hey – he’s still gets lots of sex from a woman who inexplicably still likes him.

No man ever calls himself a metro-sexual but they’re out there, being lampooned by my husband and his mates. Apparently, those young blokes who’ve converted to man-scaping their bodies with tattoos and shaved chests and skin tight jeans are letting the team down. In the name of research, I asked my James Bond some apparel questions as he was spread-eagled on the sofa watching Goldfinger. He was in smart casual: a favourite stained shirt with a pair of footy shorts last worn during the legendary  University Football Club A-colts 1985 grand final. “Would you wear skinny trousers?” “Only if I was man-orexic. “  ”How about a man-purse?”  “Yes, if you were Pussy Galore and I was armed with a Walther PPK.”

Perhaps men’s fashion should be left to those who understand it. According to Oscar Schoffler, the  longtime fashion editor of Esquire: “Never underestimate the power of what you wear. After all, there’s just a small bit of yourself sticking out at the collar and cuff.”What about the not so small bit of my man sticking out between the shirt and the shorts? His response from the sofa: “That’s the fuel tank for a sex machine.” (The bad jokes are never-ending in our house.)

I console myself that his self-esteem is rock solid. While I dress to conceal the naked truth I see in the mirror each morning, he likes to put it about in low-slung Levis and shrunken t-shirts. He still thinks I am living with a God.

So for any husbands out there wondering what piece of apparel they should make space for in the domestic wardrobe next season, my husband says the gent’s waistcoat is going to make a comeback. In grey woollen flannel a la Sean Connery in Thunderball. I can’t wait to see if he’s right. Or how it’s going to look with a cardigan.